We just released a pretty cool new roles based Smarter Commerce portal leveraging parallax design... What the heck is parallax you ask? I too had to look it up. According to Wikipedia; Parallax is a displacement or difference in the apparent position of an object viewed along two different lines of sight, and is measured by the angle or semi-angle of inclination between those two lines.

Okay, so back to the portal and why I'm writing about it. There's really two, well maybe three key reasons I'm mentioning it.

We have a new B2B eBook and webinar that I think you will find useful along with some other valuable content... Go to the ReThink B2B Portal

We have a new MFT eBook and a few webinars that will help you evaluate your file transfer security... Go to Rethink MFT Portal

This page will require a one time registration to access the assets, but I think you will find all of the eBooks and webinars quite valuable. If for nothing else, check out the new parallax design features.

In my last blog I provided some shocking stats on the volume and continued reliance on phone, fax, email, and postal mail based business-business (B2B) transactions such as purchase orders (POs) and invoices. This leads me to a fact that I cannot ignore. In my past 7 years in this industry one of the most common questions I get from customers relates to calculating their manual processing costs of everyday business documents. As a result, I’ve worked with a number of analyst firms over the years to track down these costs while also building out a simple tool that is used weekly by companies around the globe to estimate manual processing costs.

The one thing that seems to hold true is that unless you are outsourcing manual document processing to emerging markets you are likely paying significantly more than if you would simply extend your current B2B integration investment to address these manual partners. Additionally, no matter how often we run these research programs, the cost is not changing that rapidly, continuing to range somewhere between $10-$20 per document with on average error rates around 10% and upward of $50 to resolve a PO or invoice with errors in administrative time.

Mind you none of these numbers take into account costs associated with customer satisfaction impacts, excess inventory or missed sales due to short-ships, nor missed discounts on invoice payments or lags in receipt of payment due to invoicing errors.

So focusing solely on the transactional side of things, here’s the simple questions we use to help calculate your potential:

How many partners do you have?

What percent are manual vs. automated?

How quickly can you onboard new partners?

Average number of invoices, POs, ship notices, or other docs (any or all)

With these questions and about 5 minutes you can generate an 8 page custom report about your potential savings by automating more of your documents. Check it out the B2B Automation Savings Calculator for your free report.

It's 2013, and EDI or electronic data interchange has been a standard for over 40 years, yet companies are still leaving money on the table by continuing to manually process high percentages of business-to-business (B2B) transactions via phone, fax, email, and even postal mail. If this is your company, don't worry you aren’t alone… But rest assured there is a better, smarter way!

IBM recently commissioned Vanson Bourne to run the 2013 B2B and MFT Global Study where we asked 650 Senior level IT executives from 8 Countries across 7 industries a series of questions to uncover current electronic commerce trends*. Here is just a sample of what we found:

When asked to choose the primary communication methods for business transactions such as purchase orders (POs) and invoices here is what we learned:

78% of respondents use Email which equates to 32% of their total B2B transactions
53% of respondents use Fax/Mail which equates to 26% of their total B2B Transactions
50% of respondents use phone which equates to 23% of their total B2B Transactions

Why should this be a concern for your company? The list of reasons is long, but in summary, manual transactions;

leverage costly human labor to key into backend systems and often lead to even more costs when keying errors occur.

result in blind spots in your operational and performance visibility often leading to customer satisfaction issues from delays, shortages, and inaccurate orders or invoices

can lead to compliance challenges due to a lack of governance and control

The good news is there are numerous customers out there today leveraging Smarter Commerce solutions to synchronize their value chains by automating small manual partners with web forms, fax and postal mail conversion services, and simplified in network processing delivered through managed services offerings.

In my next blog, we'll look at how easy it is to build a case for automating these transactions; leveraging past and present analyst transaction cost information and an IBM B2B Automation Savings Calculator.

* Vanson Bourne Research covered these countries, industries, and roles: